The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

Hood’s version also held sway in the visual arts, with a number of paintings based on his work, from Alfred Rankley’s 1852 Royal Academy piece Eugene Aram in the Schoolroom and Eugene Aram’s Dream, a bas-relief by Matthew Noble that was chosen to represent British Art at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. (As late as 1889, reproductions of this work were still being advertised.) Rankley’s piece was praised in the Athenaeum for its depiction of an Aram ‘gnawed by the conscience-worm that never dies’, and the same publication was even more enthusiastic about ‘two weird drawings’ on the subject by Mr Rossiter, which show ‘the scared murderer coming to the well-known place in the wood, and finding that a mighty wind has laid bare the body. The bare wounded head and clutched hand protrude through the shrinking leaves.’ The story had evidently evolved: a fourteen-years-dead body still showing a wound? What wood? Yet a wood, and a recently murdered victim, had become the dominant pictorial image: at the 1872 International Exhibition praise was given to Alfred Elmore’s picture of Aram in a wood, ‘startled by the half-revealed body of the murdered man lying among the treacherous leaves’. There were further versions on the same subject over the next decades, by A. Dixon, John Pettie (whose murderer was condemned by the Era as looking like a ‘country clergyman … telling the little boy to be sure and come to church next Sunday’) – there was even an image by Thackeray.

The story was now part of middle-class moral education, and Hood’s poem became a favoured party piece for children: Aubrey Beardsley recited it at school in the 1880s, and Lord Alfred Douglas even claimed that Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol ‘owed something to that fine poem’ too. A vicar in Sunderland lectured on ‘Eugene Aram: his life, trial, condemnation, and execution’ ‘under the auspices of the Baker-street Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society’.*A Social Reform Society’s weekly entertainment included a reading of Hood’s ballad. The poem was regarded by some as a bit suspect, though, smacking too much of theatre, and too little of moral uplift. The Revd J.C.M. Bellew was condemned by the Birmingham Post for performing it too dramatically: ‘A less demonstrative reading would have been. more suitable.’ Others disagreed:‘Penny Readings for the People’ at Mechanics’ Institutes frequently included the poem.

There were also professional performances of the work. In 1858 ‘Mr Walter Montgomery’ appeared at the Music Hall, Broad Street, Birmingham. On the first night he recited ‘from Memory, the whole of SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY OF “MACBETH”, ASSISTED BY AN EFFICIENT CHOIR’. The next night too was devoted to ‘the BEAUTIES of SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER CELEBRATED AUTHORS’, including ‘Little Jim: a Tale of the Collieries (by desire)’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and Hood’s ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Hood seemed not to work in music hall: I have found only one reference to a performance, and the review says the choice was ‘very injudicious’, being ‘long’ and ‘heavy … altogether out of place’. For those who wanted theatre, but could not attend because of religious or moral scruples, Aram was available elsewhere. The Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street staged one-man entertainments from 1850, and in 1873, when a new theatrical adaptation of Eugene Aram opened at the Lyceum with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the Era reviewed the Gallery’s last night of the season, which included ‘a new drama, performed for the first time on any stage, entitled Impeached, written apparently [‘apparently’ is wonderful] in blank verse, and in artistic style, by Miss H.L. Walford, who takes for her plot the leading incidents of Eugene Aram’.

Ultimately Henry Irving took over as the supreme reciter of Hood’s poem. At a time when it was still the norm to have two plays on the bill every evening, he performed it in the break between the two; he also frequently performed it separately in mixed programmes. He also had years of success in The Bells, an adaptation of a French play called Le Juif polonais, in which he played a burgomaster who, fifteen years before, had robbed and murdered a man. This long-undiscovered secret is threatened by his guilty conscience, which transforms some passing sleigh-bells into those on the murdered man’s sleigh. Shrieking, ‘The bells! The bells!’ he falls into a fit, is later hypnotized and betrays himself. To follow this success, in 1873 the playwright W.G. Wills took the story of Aram, as glamorized by Bulwer, and turned it into classy West End fare by removing the melodrama: there is no trial, no criminal awaiting execution; Aram is not only not executed, he doesn’t even kill himself. Instead, he just somehow dies, romantically, in a moonlit churchyard in his fiancée’s arms. Perhaps, mocked the Saturday Review critic, ‘he caught cold by sleeping in a damp churchyard’.* By the 1890s, Irving was reciting Hood’s verses with ‘Dr. Mackenzie’s incidental music’. (Alexander Campbell Mackenzie was the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, as well as a conductor and composer.) In 1896, Granville Bantock wrote a four-act opera based on Bulwer’s novel.

Opera was the logical culmination of music and melodrama. Initially, music had been essential to melodrama, as licensing laws barred spoken dialogue in the minor theatres. After speech was reintroduced, music continued to play a major part, not only in the form of songs, but to underscore the emotions of the characters. Every theatre orchestra had its own ‘agits’ (that is, agitatos, music indicating fear or distress), ‘slows’ (slow music for grave moments), ‘hurries’, ‘pathetics’, ‘struggles’ and more. As late as 1912, the catalogue of Samuel French, the theatrical publisher, listed: ‘Incidental Music Suitable for Lively Rise of Curtain, Entrance of Characters, &c., Hurry, Combat, Apparitions, Pathetic Situations, Martial, &c.’ The critic Percy Fitzgerald, who had been one of Irving’s assistants, noted that at transpontine theatres, ‘what so natural as that when smugglers, or robbers, or captives trying to make their escape should, when moving lightly on tiptoe past the unnatural tyrant’s chamber, be kept in time by certain disjointed and jerking music?’†

As late as 1890, Aram was still attracting novelists. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (author of one of the first sensation-novels, Lady Audley’s Secret, pp.296–7), now with nearly sixty novels to her name, and an invalid husband to support, produced One Life, One Love. In it she repeats the long-hidden-murder motif, enmeshed in a story of the Paris Commune, double-identity, heroines regularly going mad and a plot so confusing that there is no real resolution, because, I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened, and understandably did not want to read it over again. The Aram theme was briefly touched on in 1894, in Catherine Louise Pirkis’s ‘The Murder at Troyte’s Hill’, in which a lodgekeeper is murdered after decades of blackmail, and the case is solved by the lady detective Loveday Brooke. The murderer is writing a treatise on Aram’s legendary subject, philology, ‘a stupendous work. a work that will leave its impress upon thought in all the ages to come’ (for more on this story, see p.402).

And then there was a final, extraordinarily derivative theatrical version. After All (1895) was written by Freeman C. Wills, W.G. Wills’ brother. Aram was played by Martin Harvey (later Sir John MartinHarvey), who had worked for Irving for fourteen years, and Ruth (the Madeline character) by Mabel Terry-Lewis, Ellen Terry’s niece. It had, remarkably, a happy ending: Houseman denounces Aram, Aram defends himself, and Walter in a gentlemanly way accepts his apology. It is not surprising that no one chose to follow this.

The constant renewal of Aram’s story contrasts sharply with another eighteenth-century murder case that also achieved a blaze of interest in the nineteenth century, but as quickly sputtered out. In 1739, a Mr Hayes stopped at Jonathan Bradford’s Oxfordshire inn. In conversation Hayes disclosed that he was carrying a great deal of money, and, two guests overhearing this, a robbery was planned. That night the two men entered his room, only to find Hayes dead and Bradford standing over the body, bloody knife in hand. Bradford’s defence was that he had gone in to rob his guest, but had found him already dead, and had just picked up the knife that was lying beside the corpse when the two men discovered him. This unlikely story was given short shrift at his trial, and Bradford was found guilty and hanged. Eighteen months later, so the story goes, Mr Hayes’ servant confessed on his deathbed: he had murdered and robbed his master, and Bradford had appeared just as he fled. There is little contemporary material to allow a balanced assessment of the case, but four inhabitants of an inn all set on robbery on the same night sounds more like art than life.

Kirby’s Wonderful Magazine, a hodgepodge miscellany which reprinted the story in 1804, felt it needed an injection of realism, so it made the two guests enter the room because they heard a noise, not because they too were planning robbery. Several newspapers picked up the story, although with no great sense of urgency – the Ipswich Journal ran it two years later, mixed in with paragraphs on the slave trade and on the reported death of the explorer Mungo Park, and a report that a pointer had had a litter of seventeen pups.

The novelist Amelia Opie used the basic scenario for a short story in 1818. In ‘Henry Woodville’, Woodville is a clerk to a prosperous merchant. At an inn he and David Bradford, an ex-colleague who had been sacked for dissipation, quarrel. That night the inn’s waiter robs and murders Bradford, knowing that Woodville will be suspected because of the quarrel. Woodville is found guilty, but as he is about to be executed the waiter, now repentant and dying, appears at the foot of the scaffold to assure the crowd, ‘I – I murdered Bradford! – I am the real murderer!’ before collapsing. There were no detective, suspense or procedural motifs in this version – none of the elements that, half a century later, would be the main purpose of any similar tale.

It was perhaps the still undeveloped nature of detective fiction that made Bradford of more interest to theatre. There was a token nod in 1811 in Killing No Murder, by Thomas Hook. One of the characters is named Bradford, the play is set in an inn, and another character is told to report his own pretended death. Otherwise it is a standard farce, with everyone in love with someone else, all at the same time pretending to be their own cousins or uncles or valets. In 1826 Drury Lane’s The Murder’d Guest had a very Jonathan Bradford-like set-up, with an Oxfordshire inn, a guest who arrives with his servant and is put in a room next to two strangers, and a murderer who is preempted. This was followed in 1830 by The Murderers of the Round Tower Inn, a ‘Nautical Drama’ at the Royal West London Theatre. It too had a Bradford-like innkeeper, whose stepdaughter innocently wonders, ‘What can be the reason of his always sending me to bed so early, whenever Travellers sleep in the house?’ ‘Dreadful groans and noises in the night’, combined with the travellers’ complete absence in the morning, fail to enlighten her.

It was in 1833 that the story of Jonathan Bradford finally found fame, when David Osbaldiston, the manager of the Surrey Theatre, turned to Edward Fitzball for a new work. Many years later, Fitzball claimed that a theatre manager had once advised him: ‘Look into the papers’ for a subject; the daily crime-sheets had ‘incident enough invented there’. This was standard procedure for many dramatists. For most of the century, playwrights barely scratched out a living, while churning out vast quantities of work. For authors, drama did not pay. A century earlier, Dr Johnson had received nearly £300 for the performing and publishing rights for a play that ran nine nights. By 1829 Douglas Jerrold was paid £5 a week as house author at the Surrey, and was expected to write at least one play a month; George Dibdin Pitt, the man who brought Sweeney Todd and his murderous barber-chair to the stage in 1841, produced twenty-six plays in 1847 alone. Dickens claimed that W.T. Moncrieff had written seven melodramas for £5 each.*

In terms of content, the result, Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Roadside Inn, was not much different from earlier evilinnkeeper melodramas. Fitzball definitely knew Mrs Opie’s story, because two years earlier he had adapted another story from the same collection. He also used some standard elements from stage and penny-bloods: there was an underground crypt borrowed from gothic romance, a devil-may-care Irish highwayman and a comic Cockney apprentice. The key to the play’s extraordinary success was the completely novel staging devised by Fitzball. He set the four rooms of the inn all onstage at once, in cross-section, and wrote the murder scene so that the action took place simultaneously across them. Or, as one advertisement had it, ‘In this peculiar scene an effort will be made (never yet attempted on any stage) so to harmonize four actions as to produce one striking effect! Fitzball later remembered how the mutinous actors petitioned Osbaldiston ‘to insist on my leaving out this perplexing, unexampled, undramatic, unactable four-roomed scene’. Osbaldiston too was unenthusiastic, but finally agreed to let Fitzball make the attempt. On the opening night, ‘the audience looked at each other exactly in the same fashion as the actors had done’. But then, ‘as if convinced, on reflection, that there was something original to applaud. they took the lenient side, and applauded unanimously’*.

The play was a smash. Its hundredth performance, or ‘centenary’, got a notice in The Times.† Ultimately the play closed in December, after a run of 161 consecutive performances (excluding Sundays). It was the first play ever to achieve this, and the record that was held for over two decades. Smaller populations had produced a repertorybased system reliant on the repeated attendance of the same people, rather than the infrequent attendance of different ones. In the 1840s, only four plays ran in London for more than a hundred nights and they were not consecutive. Short runs in 1833 did not necessarily signify failure, only the small theatregoing population. Jonathan Bradford was staged in Dublin in November and, at least according to the advertisements, was received with ‘rapturous and unbounded applause’, but it only appears to have had three performances. The play was revived over and over again – advertisements for different versions continued to appear as late as the 1880s.

Within months of the London opening, there were productions across the country – Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool, Ipswich, Dublin and Belfast newspapers all carried advertisements, although only the Hampshire Telegraph mentioned the novel staging, the original selling point. Instead, many theatres interpolated local speciality acts. In Portsmouth, audiences were promised ‘a Parody on the popular Song of “The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea”,’ as well as the appearance of Miss Parker to sing ‘A Kind Old Man Came Wooing’.

By 1839, the novelty staging was used in other plays. A production of Jack Sheppard at Sadler’s Wells had a similar compartment set to show Sheppard’s escape from Newgate: ‘Four Cells, two above and two below … doors, leading from one cell to the other – a fire-place at the back’. As the audience watches, Sheppard frees himself from his fetters, scrapes away at the brickwork until he can wrench out the bar blocking the chimney flue, which he then climbs into and vanishes from sight. In a moment, a hole opens in the cell above, and Sheppard appears once more. He then breaks down the cell door and vanishes through it, to reappear above, on the flat roof of the prison. This was very obviously of enormous drama, for at that moment, instead of escaping, Sheppard says, ‘Ah! my blanket! I had forgotten it,’ and makes the entire trip in reverse: through the two cells, down the hole in the chimney and back into the condemned cell. He collects his blanket, and the audience watches as he makes the trip a third time. On the roof he then tears up the blanket and is finally seen through the cell window abseiling down the side of the gaol.

Given Fitzball’s triumphant success, it is a surprise to see almost no subsequent fiction based on Bradford’s story. The only adaptations of any repute are three versions all by Sheridan Le Fanu, the Irish novelist and ghost-story writer.* He approached it first in 1848, in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston’, then again three years later in The Evil Guest. A third version, A Lost Name, appeared in 1868. All were variants on the same story: a man of bad character is found dead at a friend’s house. A faithful servant is suspected (and in one of these versions confesses), but it was the friend who killed him, after which the servant came into the room to find him dead, as in Bradford. When a memory of the penny-blood version cropped up in Dickens’ ‘The Holly Tree Inn’ (1855), it was as ‘a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents of the tragedy’. What had lingered in Dickens’ memory was the staging.

Instead, it was the penny publications that picked up the story, following the stage version closely, rather than inventing facts or characters to beef up the eighteenth-century story on their own. The real crime had by now been almost entirely forgotten. In the 1850s, in publishers’ lists of penny-bloods, Jonathan Bradford appeared together with fictional titles like The Poisoner, or, The Perils of Matrimony. Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Road-side Inn. A Romance of Thrilling Interest was published in eighteen parts, attributed to ‘the author of “The Hebrew Maiden”, “The Wife’s Secret”, &c. &c.’, who is thought to be Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific penny-writer who had had a hand in the original version of Sweeney Todd. This was very much a story aimed at the working classes, in that throughout it is the petty bourgeoisie who thwart the good honest working people. An unpleasant, officious lawyer casts suspicion on all the good characters, while Dan Macraisy, the highwayman, although condemned in somewhat perfunctory fashion for being a murderer, offers the justification that ‘perhaps if this Mr. Hayes had not gone about with so much gold in his pocket, he might have been alive at this moment’. It was the victim’s fault for being rich while others were poor.

And finally, Jonathan Bradford cropped up regularly in police reports when penny-gaffs were raided, or booth-theatre proprietors were prosecuted for performing without a licence. Household Words also published a reminiscence of childhood ½d. peepshows, describing a showman who carried a box on his back. ‘The interior was lighted up with a candle in the middle of the day, and the different highly-coloured tableaux were let down with a heavy flop by strings at the side. wonderful atmospheric effects were introduced at the back, by lifting a lid, and the whole was made more interesting by a running description. by the proprietor.’ The shows that were mentioned by title were Mazeppa (Astley’s most popular hippo–drama) and Jonathan Bradford.

The most lasting, and most important, contribution of the Jonathan Bradford story was to extend our ways of seeing. In 1852, the playwright Dion Boucicault adapted a French play as The Corsican Brothers. Originally it had been a very ordinary melodrama of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. Two elements, both descendants of Fitzball’s Jonathan Bradford, lifted the piece out of basic genre and made audiences see anew. Acts I and II of the play were to be understood to occur simultaneously, seen from the perspective of each brother; furthermore, at the end of Act I, the actions that would take place at the climax of Act II were, with the aid of new stage technology, played out at the back of the stage as a ghostly pre-vision.

In 1858 the idea of simultaneity of view was taken further by the painter Augustus Egg. His Past and Present triptych is a morality tale, set, like a theatrical melodrama, in a middle-class home. And, like Jonathan Bradford, it shows in its tripartite structure actions that take place in different – and simultaneous – times. The centre panel shows the moment a wife’s adulterous liaison has been discovered by her husband. Egg’s depiction could be a tableau from any melodrama, with the husband holding the telltale letter, the woman in a swoon at his feet. (Over his shoulder is a painting of a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield, a noted set designer, tying the story even more tightly to the theatre.) It is the outer wings of the triptych, however, that make the work so innovative. Both are set some time after the central scene. On the left, the adulterous woman, reduced to destitution, sits under the arches by the river, contemplating suicide as she gazes at the moon. On the right, her two soon-to-be-motherless children are alone in their attic room, also staring at the moon, which is covered with the identical cloud formation that the mother is staring at, indicating that the two panels are depicting the identical moment in time. As both the children and their mother face inwards, to the central panel, Egg also conveys that they are, simultaneously, all thinking of that day when their world collapsed.

By 1871, The Book of Remarkable Trials gave only one page to Bradford (Jack Sheppard had twenty, Eugene Aram seventeen), and the author excused the scanty coverage: ‘The details of this case reach us in a very abridged form; and we have been unable to collect any information on which any reliance can be placed.’ The next murderer, John Scanlan, was even more completely subsumed into his dramatic doppelganger.

Dion Boucicault had had a huge success with The Corsican Brothers in 1852, that play of double identities and duels, revenge and apparitions, with a famous double role for the actor-manager Charles Kean. But the two men quarrelled, and Boucicault and his actress wife went to New York, where in 1860 he wrote and they both starred in The Colleen Bawn. In triumph, they returned to London, to produce an amazing ten-month run of the play at the Adelphi Theatre.

The Colleen Bawn tells the story of Hardress Cregan, a young Irish squire who is smitten by the beautiful but poor Eily O’Connor, the ‘Colleen Bawn’, or fair maid (played by Agnes Robertson, Mrs Boucicault). In the face of her purity and goodness, Cregan is unable to seduce her, and agrees to marry her. His mother, meanwhile, is being wooed by the evil Squire Corrigan. When she repudiates him (‘Contemptible hound, I loathe and despise you!’), he threatens to foreclose on her mortgage. She sees a way out of her money troubles by marrying Hardress to Anne Chute, the daughter of the local landowner; Anne, however, loves Cregan’s college friend Kyrle Daly. Hardress is now regretting his marriage: Eily speaks in dialect, is poor, and has ‘low’ friends, including Myles-na-Coppaleen (played by Boucicault), once a horse dealer, but now, brought down by unrequited love for the Colleen Bawn, a smuggler and poacher. The crippled Danny Mann, Hardress’ loyal servant, tells him: ‘do by Eily as wid the glove there on yer hand … if it fits too tight, take the knife to it … Only gi’ me the word, an’ I’ll engage that the Colleen Bawn will never throuble ye any more.’ Hardress is shocked, but Mrs Cregan overhears and tells Danny that Hardress has agreed to Eily’s death. Danny takes Eily out in his boat at night, and tries to get the marriage licence from her, but she refuses. ‘Then you’ve lived too long. Take your marriage lines wid ye to the bottom of the lake.’ He tosses her overboard and rows off. Myles, who is out checking on his illegal still, shoots wildly at Danny, before dramatically leaping from the cliff to rescue Eily. In the last act, Danny thinks Eily is dead, and confesses all to Father Tom. Meanwhile, Hardress has agreed to marry Anne, but on their wedding day Corrigan, who overheard Danny’s confession, arrives to arrest him for murder. In the nick of time, Myles appears with Eily. Mrs Cregan asks forgiveness, and Hardress, transformed by this trauma, swears eternal love for the Colleen Bawn. Anne and Kyrle Daly find each other, Corrigan is thrown in the horsepond, Myles is acclaimed a hero and everyone is happy in time for the final curtain.